Saddleback’s student leaders resign and what ASG is doing in their absence

Edward Mcelroy, one of Saddleback College’s candidates for student president of the 2024-25 school year stands in the quad, available to answer student questions and talk about his campaign. Presley Davis/Lariat

After the resignation of both the student president and vice president Saddleback College’s Associative Student Government, also known as ASG,  has been pushed to find a new system that doesn’t require its conventional leaders until our new student president takes over next year.

“It’s not unheard of, it’s just unfortunate,” said Christopher Hargraves, Board of Governance advisor regarding the resignations. 

The student president, Gloria Lee, was the first to withdraw. Before this, however, ASG was trying to implement impeachment.

“She stopped coming to meetings,” said Edward Mcelroy, ASG senator for inner-club council. 

The impeachment however was dropped when Lee withdrew officially on Dec 4.

“One of the bigger reasons was the problem with her homework and all of her life,” Mcelroy said, explaining that from his knowledge Lee had taken on twenty units this semester. “She’s just like I can’t take the responsibility of being our president right now and she put out an email to everyone in ASG and resigned.”

“The demands, especially for the president, can be quite a bit,” Hargraves said, however, he adds, “this was her second time being president, and she wanted to continue that work. She felt like she could take it on again.”

The demands of being president include meetings throughout the week and meeting with Saddleback’s president Elliot Stern monthly amongst other ASG responsibilities.

“None of those positions are paid in any way and so it’s kind of one of those things where you need to prioritize,” Hargraves said.

After the president’s official resignation, the academic senate held a special meeting on Dec 8 to discuss the best course of action. The meeting minutes reveal that ASG previously had a line of succession in place. The line of succession was taken off the president’s job description, where it was previously listed, and was supposed to be put somewhere else. 

“However, they forgot to put it back,” Hargraves said, as recorded in the meeting’s minutes.

Hargraves determined that ASG had two options. A special election or just not having a president. The Senate decided on the latter.

At that meeting, Hargraves suggested that Spring Momeni, Saddleback’s student vice president, has the authority to take over running the Executive Branch. 

Momeni agreed to temporarily, however, three days later she resigned. Mcleroy said that Momeni’s reasoning for the resignation was nearly the same as Lee’s.

Currently, as a solution until the next election cycle, the Senate is running as what Mcelroy describes as an oligarchy.

“we delegated those [presedential and vice president responsibilities]  powers through all of the senators and the executives,” Mcelroy said.

“If this happened last year they may have had more issues,” Hargraves said, explaining that last year ASG tried to set itself up to be stronger this year. He also added that this semester ASG is made up of “Esteem leaders.”

Hargraves said that currently, the system ASG is running by is “going pretty well.”

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